Susan van Haitsma: We Will Not Pay for Killing

[W]hat happens when the majority of Americans want war to stop, and the money
to wage it keeps flowing in? Larger bonuses are used to lure enlistees, and
more military services are performed by expensive contract labor. The machine
rolls on.

What happens when wage earners get together and withhold their financial
resources from the war? The amount of money diverted from death to life may
be small in the face of the huge
U.S. military
budget, but the challenge to the system is great. Somehow, when someone
says, “Not with my money,” and backs it up with the open civil disobedience
of war tax refusal, eyes open wider. “You can do that?” Yes, we can and do.

Here are a couple of new links for the frugality set:

Oolsi: “We believe everything should
be free! This site will keep track of websites and tools that share this
philosophy and look at freeware in other aspects of life — i.e. saving money, living cheaply, making
things yourself, and self learning.”

Wendy McElroy’s new discussion forum has
a
section on economy, business, personal finance, and frugality.

It was often claimed in the founding period — and it is claimed today by
jurists like Justice Souter and by scholars like Noah Feldman — that citizens
have a right of conscience not to pay taxes that will be used to advance
religious teachings which they do not believe. But advocates of this position
typically reject the corresponding claim that citizens have a right of
conscience not to pay taxes that will be used to advance non-religious (or,
in their view, anti-religious) teachings in which they do not believe. Are
these positions reconcilable? This essay investigates the question and
concludes that they are not. Nor is it a tenable position to hold that
conscience is violated by the use of a citizen’s tax dollars to promote any
beliefs, religious or non-religious, that particular taxpayers reject. So
jurists and scholars would do well to drop the selective and opportunistic
appeal to the ostensible connection between taxes and conscience.

Find Out More!

For more information on the topic or topics below (organized as “topic →
subtopic →
sub-subtopic”), click on any of the ♦ symbols to see other pages on this site that cover the topic. Or browse the site’s topic index at the “Outline” page.